Programming Challenges
by Miguel Revilla, Steven S. Skiena

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Book Reviews of Programming Challenges

Book Review: Pearl of Programming Contest :)
Summary: 4 Stars

From the first chapter and appendices this book is trying to familiarize the online judge and contest system to the newcomers and old contestants will know about different language using statistics and problem's level.

Most of the book (80%) generally discusses on "Data Structures". There are of course many very good books on this particular important field, but this book focus on their implementation in contests rather than deep materials. And the good thing is, it gives reference on any specific part of data structures or algorithms for further study.

I think the mathematical problem oriented portion (graph theory, number theory and geometry) is brighter than the other topics. It's good as algorithmic problems of programming contests always carry some special cases that depend on mathematics. Besides, many contestants just miss the higher rankings just for comparatively weakness in mathematics.

A good algorithm book shouldn't depend on any particular programming language but this is not an algorithm book, it's a programming contest tutorial or manual, so, it also contains different tips of algorithmic performance with time and tricky language syntax usage to optimize the solution of any challenging contest problem. But this book seems to be C language oriented. It's true that it has given many good library references on C++ and packages of Java but you won't find any code belongs to these languages. May be both C++ and Java (it's much more than C++) contains many predefined methods to handle data structures. But I think, as there are many good books on data structure and algorithm then it should give more C++ and Java code and their usage in contests, where of course time matters.

And the other thing is, this book contains many problems which are taken from acm.uva.es site, besides it's a book which have a companion website then it can be easily avoided to give the problems (description and sample IO) in the book. The pages used just for the problems can be more utilized by giving many techniques on the contest and tricky language syntax or library usage of C++, Java and another avoided language PASCAL.

Summary of Programming Challenges

Computer & Video Games Books

• Subjects > Computers & Technology > Games & Strategy Guides
• Hardware > Microprocessors & System Design
• Programming > Algorithms
• Software Design, Testing & Engineering
• Software